I wouldn't blame the Auction for it, because if you think about it, about 20 people for example got items, and there were hundreds and hundreds of tears in game. And at least half of them didn't have to buy too many tears, they had simply saved.
At the moment there is still a massive amount of tears in the game, but people might be saving them thinking that there'll be an Auction, even though I have already warned there might never be another auction event like that, or it might not even be in tears if it happens again. It did of course remove many tears and did a good thing too, because there was an inflation due to tear farmers rampaging, but maybe that's what the matter is, people keep stashing their tears thinking of future events that probably will not happen.

Now, Fran. I already told you some of this in my PM to you so I will quote myself from the post cie wie included in his post above.

Just a fast calculation, since you said you got 2000 tears on your own last month.

In a month (30 days):

1. If a person votes properly (and we do not get the bonus votes from the vote event), and he stays online with only ONE character
He gets 2640 tears per month.

2. If in the middle of the month we get the vote event done, vote tears get doubled.
So instead of the above, the sum becomes 3240 tears.

3. If that person has an alt online while playing (lets say for half the hours of his main character, and lets say he only leaves the main online when he's sleeping etc) and that one gets online tears as well,
then the sum becomes: 3960 tears.

4. Now, if you also do your Vortex runs every day too, you can easily get tears as a reward, and you can get it multiple times in one go as well.

Which means that you can get more than 4000 tears per month. And I won't mention selling stuff or trading of course.

This is a rough calculation of how you get tears. Not to mention GM events, which give quite a lot of tears sometimes.

People are used to stashing many tears in the game, and if they are now not seeing the huge numbers they had before, they think there's too little around. A quick look in the database shows differently.

All you need to do is be patient and play. Soon you'll start getting things like everyone else.

Now, the topic has been talked about again and I don't feel like seeing people fight with each other in a flame war again.
So since this has been addressed, I'll be locking it.